Slavery and the Romantic Imagination. Debbie Lee

fires,

      Till nature, spent with agony, expires.⁵⁹

      Wordsworth also spoke of slavery in ecological terms. It was, he said, the “most rotten branch of human shame” that ought to “fall together with its parent tree” (The Prelude, 10:224–36). From what came to be seen as the center of the Romantic poetic tradition, Wordsworth called the structures of slavery a disease that could outrot the worst atrocities of the French Revolution. Medical experts reinforced this view. “Since the abolition of the slave-trade,” wrote Dr. Henderson, “some disorders of African origin, and highly contagious, have almost disappeared.”⁶⁰

      In “The Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge captures sharply the ruination of the universe that the slave trade instigated. His mariner finds disease and thus nightmarish deformation everywhere: it appears not just in the rotting bodies of birds, men, and a white woman, but in heavenly bodies as well, such as the “bloody Sun … with broad and burning face” (112; 180). Even the body of the ship is diseased: “The planks look warped! and see those sails, / How thin they are and sere!” (529–30). The Hermit—who is also a figure for decay, as he prays at a “rotted old oak-stump”—likens the ship to the rotting skeletal leaves of the forest, decaying like the planks of the vessel, which Coleridge had already designated as a feature of a slave ship (522). In his Lecture, he noted that slaves were “crammed” into the hold of a ship “with so many fellow-victims” that “the heat and stench arising from [their] diseased bodies [would] rot the very planks” (Lects 1795, 248–49).